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political memes

For an academic grading scale, A,B,C,D,F is really dumb.

Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.

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We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.

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I ponder on these quotes, because they certainly challenge the kind of taoist/buddhist-ish equanimity I try to live. Like, I think a lot of damage is done by people firmly grasping opinions, and follow the brain's inclination to decide "Am I on team 'All For' or 'Absolutely Against' this?"

Looking up the "Have Fewer Opinions" I found this essay on it, and the socially-driven, ad-hoc, post-facto irrational justification for so much of what we do.

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Rolling Stone's Top 100 Sitcoms list is very thoughtful and fun to read.

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The older you get the more you realise you didn't grow up in a 'where', you grew up in a 'when'.

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From error to error one discovers the entire truth.

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Man, I wish Apple stores were open so I could experience Apple's adaptation of the iPad cursor for better use with a trackpad... I love how the article pointed out the breakthrough of the very first mouse cursors - the idea of the cursor being the user's tiny abstract avatar. (Anyone who has played Atari 2600 Adventure with its little box shaped player will immediately understand...) And the further idea that on a regular touchscreen, that avatar is actually your fingertip. (But that means when you withdraw your finger the avatar vanishes!)

Anyway, the near bio-logical clinginess of this new cursor looks like it would feel amazing. (Though hopefully more organic and less brittle than Photoshop clones' "snap-to" which can sometimes be frustrating.) Slate about Adam Sandler on SNL reminding you that most life-changing vacations aren't.

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"Vomiting is not celebrating."
"...Yes it is."

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Death is not without its silver lining, I guess.... (smbc)

I said: 'Imagine that you were on the threshold of this fairytale, sometime billions of years ago when everything was created. And you were able to choose whether you wanted to be born to a life on this planet at some point. You wouldn't know when you were going to be born, nor how long you'd live for, but at any event it wouldn't be more than a few years. All you'd know was that, if you chose to come into the world at some point, you'd also have to leave it again one day and go away from everything. This might cause you a good deal of grief, as lots of people think that life in the great fairytale is so wonderful that the mere thought of it ending can bring tears to their eyes. Things can be so nice here that it's terribly painful to think that at some point the days will run out.'

You sat stock still on my lap. And I said: 'What would you have chosen, Georg, if there had been some higher power that gave you the choice? Perhaps we can imagine some sort of cosmic fairy in this great, strange fairytale. Would you have chosen to live a life on earth at some point, whether short or long, in a hundred thousand or a hundred million years?'

I think I sighed heavily a couple of times before going on in a harsher tone: 'Or would you have refused to join in the game because you didn't like the rules?'

This book has an odd number of parallels with my life, from the late-revealed name of the titular character ("Veronika"), to a boy coping with the early death of his father, to a tendency to write letters for future reading, like I am with my super niece Pretty good month for music, 5 star stuff in red....

• S is for Songs (Sia / Sesame Street) SO GREAT.
• Pure Comedy (Father John Misty) A little sophomoric in parts but the very start and the very ending has such lovely lyrics
• Vivir Mi Vida (Versión Pop) (Marc Anthony) A BABAM! crew put together a version of this to back a Cosecha non-violent resistance protest. (The version I grabbed is "Versión Pop") I like it more now that I've seen the translation of the lyrics, kind of poignant given what these folks are up against.
• Million Dollar Secret (Lucius) "Girls" has introduced me to so many songs... man is this one beautiful
• Rocket Man (Elton John) (Iron Horse) Fun bluegrass cover - I hate the instrumentation of the original, but this lets me enjoy the theme.
• Crazy Bird (Wild Child) I enjoy the video for this more than the song but it's still a good song.
• Wrecking Ball (Aurora Aksnes) Another case of a slow sweet cover bringing out the beauty of a pop song.
• Mama Don't Allow (The Jive Aces) This song comes up at HONK! hang outs...
• Feel Like Funkin' It Up (Live Street Mix) (Rebirth Brass Band) The version I got has some bits from the Treme show... something i the headphone placement makes me actually look around to see the voices.
• Ambush (Lateef & The Chief) "Underground" hiphop I heard at a kebab place in Austin.... has really grown on me.
• Crowded Places (Banks) Another song I heard on "Girls"... favorite lyric "And then when I got home when I played that show in L.A / All your shit was gone / It was the only time I thought I'd made a mistake"
• Wild Things (Alessia Cara) I like the line "I lose my balance on these eggshells / You tell me to tread"
• Did I Ever Love You (Leonard Cohen) Interesting contrasts, musically.
• Now (Eyedea & Abilities) More hiphop that sounds a bit better in an Austin Kebab place.
• Can I Kick It? (A Tribe Called Quest) I think Chapelle's special had this on. Those weird simplistic rhymes might not work in other contexts...
• Ldn (Lily Allen) All her stuff sounds kinda similar but it's all pretty good.
• Shape of You (Ed Sheeran) Not so deep but the thumb piano on this is so catchy.
• Ophelia (Remastered) (The Band) I guess I like the title more than anything (I made new lyrics to Cecilia with the same title). Keep expecting it to become Billy Preston's "Nothing from Nothing"

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I skipped yoga this week, but I did assemble two largeish IKEA pieces (with help from Liz) in relatively small rooms with lots of boxes... that's kind of the same thing, right? I like everything about Dinosaur Comics' take on airplanes.

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BWAHAHA, Republican politics have a LOT of trouble with the phrase "I support Donald Trump".

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I've been fooling around with some test panels for a possible remake of Young Astronauts in Love. I think the shading works pretty well... maybe need to think about this to deal with shadows...

In the end, the greatest challenge to all the efforts to unite behind one candidate is that leaders are asking people of passion to act tactically. That's not only hard for them to do as a matter of personal constitution, but it's exactly the kind of behavior that you'd expect from people who value pragmatism over principle. In other words, moderates.

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http://www.vulture.com/2015/05/23-lost-laughs-of-letterman.html - the best jokes that didn't make it to Letterman. Love hearing about the process.

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Empathy cards designed by a cancer survivor. Oh man, these are great- like, very informative, and real. Saturday i went on a Zero G Flight -- parabolic flights over the ocean in order to get legitimate doses of zero gravity.

This is the modified 727 they use... seats are removed from everything but the back, and the rest is lined with mats, kind of like the wrestling room in gym class.


The first few arcs are acclimating Mars then Lunar low gravity. You can do one-armed or one fingered pushups with ease.


You might notice the socks. They break the group of 30 or so into 3 groups: Gold, Silver, and Blue. (I was on Team Blue.)


Finally: Zero-G!


I was clearly very proud of my Blue Lego Astronaut T-shirt...


Each arc only last 15-30 seconds, and there are about 15 of them in all.


This kind of thing is also called "The Vomit Comet", though one of the reasons they make it a relatively short trip is so that no one gets sick.


Eventually, you come down with a bit of a thump.. (they yell "feet down, leveling out" or some such, and you have to quickly get your feet oriented correctly.)


Awwww


Alright!


They also have each team do a "superman" group shot, I made the series of photos into a GIF...


So overall, it was an exhilarating and amazing time. To be completely honest, If "space travel" wasn't on my bucket list (my inner child thought he was going to see casual space travel, but this plus "Gravity in IMAX 3D" is gonna have to suffice) it might not be quite worth the sorta of exorbitant cost, but still, recommended if you got the cash and the dream!

UPDATE: A Video:

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My friend David H on FB said "dude! That is awesome. Describe what it felt like?"
My answer was:

"it's... short! And intense. And fun and disorienting. Suddenly the world of gravity you've known is gone, and you can push and shove and every direction is kind of like every other direction and people in jumpsuits are laughing and yelling and flying every which way and jostling and you can grab a bouncy wall and go into a fun spin like a ice skater and pull your arms in and go faster and try to find a grip again and then look for the little water blob or candy the your group leader released and then "FEET DOWN! LEVELING OUT!" and you have just a second before you come down to the floor with a thump and you lie down to wait for the heavy gravity, focus on a point on the ceiling to help prevent motion sickness, and then a minute later you do it all again...."

Metaphors make up a huge toolbox to help us build our thinking, metametaphorically speaking. (Trying to find a good way of expressing that last thought was like rummaging through a disorderly toolbox... metametametaphorically speaking of course.)

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Life would make a lot more sense if you could hear the laugh track.

via

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On a New York subway train, you get heavily fined if you spit. On the other hand, you're allowed to throw up for nothing

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A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular.

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Ah, ok. Adlai Stevenson != Spiro Agnew. Obviously. Still "nattering nabobs of negativism" is a great phrase.

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The Cognitive Cost of Doing Things - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance called it "gumption"

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Why Bin Ladenism stumbles against the Pursuit of Happiness.
--via gifanime

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Wow, if only every terrorist was as clever as the guy who left his apartment AND getaway car keys in the would-be carbomb.

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Hate to ruin your childhoods, but The Power of Greyskull is NOT carbon-neutral.

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http://www.slate.com/id/2253050/ - PowerPoint isn't the problem. It's not the solution, but it's not the problem.

I commissioned this work from HARVEYJAMES because A. it was sort of a support a starving artist thing and B. his stuff is pretty awesome. (His LJ is pretty great too.)

I didn't know what to request, so I asked him to take inspiration from 10 hotties in outer space, "And maybe a dead or vanquished 60s star trek baddie like foe." I dig the Barbarella meets Sgt Pepper vibe he came up with!

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"The greatest trick the square root of negative one ever pulled was convincing the world that it didn't exist."

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The Word Wasn't Meant is a terrific name for a webcomic. And a pretty good webcomic. Yay Boston Geeks.

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I have a dream-someday I will start a Java project, and they'll say "hey we're using the framework you know+dig" and not "hey! learn this!" So, the other week I read about one horrified web designer's interview with the people at X10.com, those fine folks who really helped cement hatred of the "popunder" ad part of web culture. ("Well yeah... but honestly they made a shitload of money" said one of the interviewers there.)

Two quotes from the interviewers stood out for me...

You've probably seen our website, and as you can see, it looks pretty shitty. That's pretty much how it's going to stay.

and then on their target audience:

Men from around age 30-40 with a little extra money who like buying gadgets and aren't too concerned if it doesn't work too well.

because when I put those two concepts together in the context of my professional history, one name rung out.. but to be professional, I will keep quiet about it.

I'd like to write about it in excruciating detail now, over the course of a few days, so I need never mention it again.

The year was 1999. (At the risk of getting ahead of myself in the story, my proposed slogan for their ammo catalog then was Ammo @ [REDACTED]: "Let's shoot our way through Y2K"(tm)) I was working for another small company, owned by a major midwest publisher...

<geek>Oy, what a company! Back in their pure dotcom they were pioneers in dynamic websites, claiming to have invented the Virtual Server patch for sun machines that let one machine act as the webserver for various domains. In fact they were such early innovators they had their own templating language that they clung to even after industry standards emerged, until they decided to switch - to a new in-house language based on Reverse Polish Notation. Not being a big fan of HP calculators I plotted my exit.</geek>

My company had been bought by the big (now defunct, huh!) midwestern printing company. That gave my company some strange, corn-fed bedfellows, companies that I assume did their printing through our parent company and were looking to have their web presence.

This catalog is, as far as I can tell, pretty much a "midwest" thing. Part of the issue was that they already had a web presence; a straight-forward retelling of their print catalogs in Microsoft code.

The first task was to port their existing website to our own technology. They really didn't want to make it look any better, and they stuck to their guns that their website should just be a big mirror of their multiple catalogs.

The first part of that made life little fun for me, who had to do the port. I learned a valuable lesson though; when they turned the firehose from their hammered Windows NT boxes to our inhouse solution, our server went down, hard. The volume was relatively enormous, and we had a major failure of due diligence in testing how our stuff scaled. <geek>The emergency fix for that was kind of cool, something to talk about on future interviews: we discovered the problem was with the DB queries, and realized that that each catalog page had a distinct URL that we could use as the basis of a rough-and-ready homebrew cache.</geek>

The second part made life no fun for our design group (who had ambition; they wanted to kind of segment themselves off as "216design.com", some play on the Netscape color safe palette) Every month 2 or 3 catalogs would come out that they had to make into webpages, grabbing the artwork, fixing up the text markup, and correlating the item numbers. Sheer drudgery, and we lacked the tools to really automate it, since what they got were the raw Quark files (quirky Quark; I remember the lead guy chucking about how the print catalog designers basically used big photos as their wastebasket, hiding unneeded art behind.) I did what I could with my Perl mojo, but it was still a major pain in the ass, a vast parade of guns and domestic wares and crappy closeout specials that had no end in site, and no real way of streamlining the monotony. And making it worse was the "best buddy" style the whole catalog was written, like it was just one guy finding all these deals for you, your best drinkin' buddy look for bargains.

TOMORROW: Kirk Visits the Frozen Wasteland

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half my trouble with household neatness: trash bin access. an attention span thing.

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new business lingo:"c level executives", c as in CEO, CIO, etc

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i kind of forget there's a starbucks like, 5 doors down. i don't like starbucks all that much but maybe forgetting is some kind of defense. I've changed webhost providers. There are still a few bugs around; as far as I know, for you guys it's mostly that now in firefox the comments submit doesn't automatically take you back to the posted comments.

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Thought of the Moment

"What do you say now to women (and maybe men, too) who are ambivalent about having a child?"
"Get to it! Life is short and kids are the best. They connect you to the future, they force you to grow up, they make you appreciate life in a totally different way. There will never be a perfect time, the right amount of money, and the mate of your dreams. You may get one out of three, and that's enough."

Not that it's a currently pressing issue for me, or I think I have any of the three really, but she makes as good an argument as I've seen.

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Absolute Geekery of the Moment
Huh, one weird problem with the new system... after some empirical experimentation and tracking down some red herrings, I realized that on my new serve any query string ending with the string "perl" would come up with a server error.

Anyway, I was weirdly proud of coming up with this unix one liner for helping synchronize my new site location with the recent changes on the new one:
find . -mtime -30 -print -exec cp --parents {} /tmp/foo \;
That finds all files modified in the last 30 days and then copies them to /tmp/foo , preserving their directory structure. (That way you can do a simple tar in that directory, and then untar it in the root directory of your final destination.) For me the new parts were find's -mtime and cp's --parents.

The other line I've been using is
find . -name "*cgi" -exec grep -Hi "/kisrael" {} \;
which would find all *cgi files containing "/kisrael"... the argument I kept forgetting is grep's -H, which prints the filename (otherwise I have to tell it to also look in /dev/null.

One of the things I remember from "The UNIX-HATERS Handbook" is how for all the love Unix "pipes" get in terms of connecting data between different programs, Mac and Windows' clipboards really blow it away, just in terms of handling text and graphics. Yeah, it's not as scriptable, but there are definitely times when you want to work with more than plain text. It must be a fair amount of automagic to get that to work properly.

I gave blood today.... actually went ahead and did the Double Red Blood Cell thing, where they use a centrifuge to take out a double dose of red cells and then put the rest back. So my sense of moral smugness should power me throughout the rest of the day.

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Passage of the Moment

i can taste summer coming. there are certain smells that i forget about until summer rolls around, and then they all come flowing back in my memory: bonfires, sunblock, cookouts, fresh-cut grass... and then there are the images, pictures of things in my mind that probably weren't as good as i remember, yet i can see them so vividly: cramming in a car to go to drive-in movies, covered in bugspray and armed with snacks; wandering around amusement parks dripping wet from water rides; grabbing an elephant ear and some cotton candy at the local fair; seeing a movie on a weeknight and leaving the theater to meet the warm night air... these are the things i hope to do every summer; sometimes i do, sometimes i don't... but this year i'm hoping extra hard.

Such a lovely passage, gave me a big old wave of nostalgic feeling. It's really good writing, a lot of sensory details if you're in the right frame of mine. Makes me happy for the return of summer! So last night Ksenia and I got to use some tickets to the Boston Ballet's production of "The Sleeping Beauty" that my Aunt and Uncle decided not to use. A few observations on ballet:

1. The show was more poorly attended than I would have guessed... I'm not sure if that's because it was opening night, and a Thursday, or if ballet is just losing out in popularity, but the place was half empty, and we were easily able to upgrade our seats on the mezzanine.

2. For all its strength and gracefulness (and I'm sure I'm badly underestimating how difficult of most of it) ballet has a large amount of somewhat clunky looking moments and poses to set up the graceful ones.

3. A few times one of the ballerinas had serious problems with squeaky shoes. That made me giggle. Plus, there were times when the clatter of feet of a group of dancers sounded like a stampede.

4. Ballet is kind of funny, it's such a set ritual and tradition...I should look into the history of it. I can see why so many little girls aspire to it, how the whole places focuses on the one lady in the lovely outfit as she dances gracefully, but I also get the sense it's a hell of a tough calling. (At my mom's old job, they split a cafeteria with a ballet school...it was kind of weird seeing all those ballerinas-in-training, with that distinctive look and styled hair, en masse. I didn't notice if their eating habits were notably light.)

Anyway, I made a joke that I thought was really funny, but pretty obscure, and unfortunately the photo of the mural that sets it up is too tough to see...but I tried to figure out who the rightmost figure reminded me of, an athletic body in an oddly modern-sports-gear looking outfit, but with a 40s/50s woman's "power haircut"...and I realized...my gosh, this is a mural from the Church of Ayn Rand!

Ha ha, get it? Ayn Rand? See, like so idealized, but with that hair...ha!

Sigh. I guess you have to see it for yourself...it's above the left side of the mezzanine of The Wang Theater.

(Incidentally, The Wang Theater is just a goofy name on two levels, the obvious sexual joke, and it's such a modern name for a place with almost over-the-top gilded columns and artwork.)

Quote of the Moment

It's not you, it's me. I don't like you.

Mr. Lex posted that one on the comments yeterday. this page has the soundclip, along with another great quote from the character Chiana,

Look Aeryn, all men are stupid, OK? Men stupid! If you want them to know something you got to tell them.

This neatly summarizes at least part of what went wrong between Mo and me.

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Link of the Moment
When Computer Geeks Dream. Not quite as cool as a typical Slow Wave, but still. If you're in a hurry, this Nethack dream is a quick giggle.

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Ramble of the Moment
I'm back to a feeling of discontent with my last name "Israel". I guess to be honest my main beef is with every-frickin' body assuming I'm Jewish. It's not that I mind being linked with that religion/culture in particular, (though I'm sure I've received some minor negative as well as positive prejudice because of it,) it's just incorrect. And I'm not particularly happy with the nation of Israel right now, though I'm at the "a pox on both your houses" stage with that whole mess. And also, it's an irritating assumption. Is someone with the last name "English" definately gonna be Episcopalian? Is someone with the last name "Montana" going to be...well, whatever Montanans are?

Plus, it's one of the easiest names to spell incorrectly. People hear the "is" and the "real" and they put it together "just like it sounds". Fact is, the only time people pronounce it "IsrAel" is in that "O come, O come Emmanuel" christmas carol.

I guess if I'm at all serious about this now would be the best time, what with the divorce and all. Probably the easiest thing would be to just use my middle name as my last and just be "Kirk Logan" (Which would be kind of funny, I used "Logan" as my first name for a while in middle school) though I'm tempted by the Zenitude of "Kirk Is". Dave Johnson was mentioning a doctor he knew recently did the same middle-to-last thing, and I could see how "Dr. Barry" sounds a bit better than "Dr. Lipschitz".

So whaddya think, am I crazy? Would I be throwing away part of my identity? Would "klogan.com" be that bad of a domain? (Just kidding, I'm meaning to start using kirkjerk.com anyway.)

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Pop Culture of the Moment

Much has been made of the unrealistically large apartments the Friends inhabit, considering their various incomes as caterer, personal shopper, out-of-work actor. But the real fiction (and true appeal) of Friends is not the size of the apartment or the sex appeal of the stars so much as the much-missed, oft-lamented characteristic of dormlife: People drop by.

I've seen maybe 3 or 4 episodes...but Seinfeld has that same "friends drop by" vibe. It's why I liked semi-communal living back in the Big Yellow House, actually. I really miss that kind of casual socialization. Now the best you can hope for is a weekly-or-so "usual get together", like how I played darts with Peterman last night. Lyric of the Moment

Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders what the part that isn't thinking isn't thinking of

Via "The Night Watchman"'s Slashdot sig, I like it from a "theory of consciousness" point of view.

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Technicalish Article of the Moment
Slashdot linked to this X-bit labs article on chess computers vs man. It was more compelling reading than I expected, even if I couldn't really read some of the chess diagrams presented later. What really surprises me is how there's this incredibly rich ability to analyze chess at a high level that probably even medium-good humans have, and that computers (and myself) almost completely lack; a vocabulary of grouping the vocabulary of chess pieces on a board into a meaningful grammar. (Though some argue the game Go is a better exercise in true AI, since it's dang near impossible to run through all the combinations of moves, like chess games generally do.)

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Vocabulary of the Moment
Did you know "crapulence" is a real word? You can look it up, though it doesn't mean what I hoped it would mean. Links of the Moment
Ever feel a bit skeptical about John Edward and his whole "Crossing Over" schtick? You should be--that's a very readable piece about what he's doing with his "live studio audience". Basically, the same tricks fake-psychics have always used with a lot of slick editing. this article gives it even more historical background, but isn't as tight of a read. (via memepool)

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Usenet Funny of the Moment

> Why do french brasseries always write their menu
> in the same typeface? And who first suggested that
> this face was 'authentic'? Is it against the law to
> use Times or Helvetica on a blackboard? Would the
> farmers go on strike and blockade the Channel ports
> if a brasserie owner was caught writing up the
> plat du jour in something else?

The scrourge of the pc: everybody is a font critic nowadays

Quote of the Moment

From the cries of Sinn Fein to the whines of Jackie Mason, everybody's got an agenda and everyone thinks he or she is right. Trying to change someone's mind usually becomes an exercise in futility, so it is your job to pretend to care. Offer some tepid advice and move on. Cultivate the Switzerland of your soul and remain delightfully detached.

I really like that "Cultivate the Switzerland of your soul and remain delightfully detached" line.

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News of the Moment
Looks as if there's a new increase in Demand for U.S. Sperm. USA! USA! But seriously, it does say some good things about this country: it's partially a result of our diversity, and relatively loose regulations. (Both good things in my book.)

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Link of the Moment
Creepy Clown. Looks like a little quiet web meme-- wouldn't be surprised if it blossoms into another "All your base", though it lacks a really catchy hook. What is it that can be so disturbing about clowns?